How surveillance technology and the ‘Reddit Detective Agency’ helped search for a killer
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — More than a decade ago, the frantic 5-day search for the Boston Marathon bombers left some lessons in its wake.
The first was that increasingly widespread surveillance technology could help catch criminals. Another was that amateur online sleuths on Reddit couldn’t do it.
But an intense search this week for the suspect in the Brown University shooting that killed two students and injured nine others has upended those expectations.
Comprehensive surveillance is now found in doorbells, cars, and a wide communications network. vehicle tracking cameraseventually helped track down the whereabouts of 48-year-old former Brown graduate student Claudio Neves Valente; investigators believed he was responsible for the December 13 shooting and the murder of an MIT professor in Brookline, Massachusetts, two days later.
But the latest AI-powered surveillance did little to help in the early search for the gunman, who fled Brown’s campus after the shooting and crept unnoticed into surrounding neighborhoods in Providence. Rhode Island. He evaded detection for days by using an untraceable phone, hiding his face with a medical-type mask, and evading facial recognition software by changing the license plates of his rental cars.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said police were able to hook up a car to Neves Valente, but a local Reddit user “blows this case wide open” with an old-fashioned tip posted on the social media platform. They finally found the suspect dead on Thursday in Salem, New Hampshire, several days after he likely killed himself.
The Reddit tipster known only as John is “no less than a hero,” Providence Mayor Brett Smiley wrote in a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel on Friday, requesting the full $50,000 reward from the FBI for information to investigators investigating the suspect.
According to fellow contributors to Reddit’s Providence forum, strangers invited him to Christmas dinner and suggested he get “the key to the city and free coffee and donuts for life.”
It’s a sharp turnaround from 2013, when commenters on Reddit and other online discussion platforms falsely tarred a Brown University student as a potential suspect in a deadly attack at the famed marathon in Boston, just an hour north of Providence, for allegedly resembling a grainy suspect image.
“Hey Reddit, enough with the Boston bombing vigil,” proclaimed a headline in The Atlantic at the time.
“In the case of the Boston Marathon, it definitely went wrong,” said Liza Potts, a professor at Michigan State University and director of the digital humanities lab that studies the online response. “So people will jokingly refer to ‘Reddit Detective Agency’ or ‘Reddit Investigation Bureau’.”
The erroneous connection between the 2013 bombers and the missing Brown student who was later found dead by suicide is still remembered by many at the Ivy League school and the surrounding community.
Brown officials this week quickly sought to quash another smear campaign circulating on In a statement, the student said the “unimaginable nightmare” of false accusations had led to “non-stop death threats and hate speech.”
Fed up with tip lines being filled with nonsense, U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat and former state attorney general, called on social media speculators to “shut up.”
“There’s no point in looking from an investigative standpoint at people who have no idea what they’re talking about offering their stupid and uninformed opinions about what’s happening on the internet,” Whitehouse said in a statement to Congress on Wednesday. he said.
But Potts said some social media work better than others, and “of all the areas I’ve looked at, Reddit has more than nailed it.”
Harmful accusations have been largely absent from Reddit’s Providence forum, in part because the volunteer moderators who run Reddit’s topic forums, known as subreddits, are largely responsible for keeping the peace.
The lead moderator of Reddit’s Providence subreddit said in an interview that he has been on the platform for nearly 15 years and remembers the trauma caused by the fake Boston Marathon report.
“The Providence subreddit is very sensitive about trying/not engaging in a witch hunt or mob mentality,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid revealing personal information and because of the platform’s culture of anonymity.
The Associated Press was also contacted Tuesday, a day after the tipster posted on Reddit urging police to examine a Nissan sedan with Florida license plates. Other Reddit users urged him to contact the FBI, and he said he did so.
He did not respond to requests for comment and later said he did not plan to speak to the media. When he finally met with police on Wednesday — after approaching them on the street and identifying himself as a Reddit tipster — the information he provided breathed new life into a stalled investigation.
With one known vehicle, Providence police began reviewing footage from dozens of AI-powered cameras positioned around the city that can read license plates as well as other identifying details about a car, such as make, color, collateral damage and even bird droppings on the window.
Cameras operated by surveillance company Flock Safety spotted his vehicle at least 14 times, starting about two weeks before the shooting, according to a police affidavit. Providence police can then ask Swarm-using police agencies in nearby cities and states to look for the same car, but there is no such car in New Hampshire (due to privacy restrictions on how long they can keep the footage).
It was a development Flock would be happy to boast about, especially as wariness continues in Providence’s immigrant communities about more aggressive federal immigration enforcement. Flock says each of its clients decides when to share camera data, and the city does not share it with federal immigration agents. But some still want more protection.
“Once you know what they are, you see them everywhere,” said Madalyn McGunagle, policy partner at the ACLU of Rhode Island. “People notice because they look different; there’s a solar panel on top and a small oval camera underneath.”
But unlike residential doorbell cameras that detected him wandering around Providence, if Neves Valente had walked past a Flock camera, the camera would not have detected him.
“This is a technical impossibility. The camera does not have the ability for the user to search for people,” Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley said in an interview Friday. “Our cameras are focused on vehicles because when you look at America, people drive. It’s very difficult to get anywhere by walking.”
“The majority of our cities just want to know who’s in and who’s out,” he said.
Still, if it weren’t for tipster John, whom local Reddit users dubbed “The Reddit Guy,” no one would know how he left.
“Someone who is in the area and constantly sees things will be better in many ways than a random camera,” the moderator of the Providence subreddit said. “John saw this guy going back and forth, unlocking his car and stuff, and he thought it was a little weird.”
